Interstellar Lab

Interstellar Lab is a French-American company building closed-loop biological systems for growing food and plants in controlled environments, on Earth and in space. Its BioPod is an inflatable, environmentally controlled cultivation pod that recycles water, converts carbon dioxide to oxygen and sharply reduces the land area needed per unit of output.

The company was founded in 2018 by Barbara Belvisi. Its NUCLEUS system is a modular bioregenerative platform of nine independent units, called Quarks, that together produce microgreens, vegetables, mushrooms and insects in a pathogen-free closed loop — aimed at long-duration crewed missions where resupply of fresh food is impractical.

Interstellar Lab operates a BioPod manufacturing facility and plant laboratory at Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris, a space laboratory at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and a business hub in San Francisco. It has partnered with Vast to fly a plant research payload aboard the Haven-1 commercial space station.